Firm Finds Strong Third-party Component Support for Microsoft .NET

January 16, 2002 -- ComponentSource, a marketplace and community for reusable software components for all platforms, today announced that approximately one-third of its expert-author community, comprising over 640 software component author companies, have joined the ComponentSource .NET ComponentBuilder Program and have pledged to release Microsoft .NET platform software components through 2002.

With the Release to Manufacturing today of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, twenty five percent of participating component authors will offer final "off-the-shelf" .NET components as early as February 2002 and estimate that Microsoft .NET will account for between twenty to thirty percent of their revenues over the course of the year, the company stated. The majority have started by developing native Microsoft C# versions of the most popular components within their existing product lines. Many are taking full advantage of the Microsoft.NET Framework to offer new feature-rich client and server-side components and are expanding their product lines, according to ComponentSource, a Software Reuse Infrastructure Provider.

Participants in the ComponentSource .NET ComponentBuilder Program, launched last year, are also testing their existing COM components to ensure they will run on the Microsoft .NET Framework, offering the potential availability of thousands more "off-the-shelf" components for the Microsoft .NET Framework over the coming year to help satisfy corporate demand, the Kennesaw, Ga., company said. Since the October launch of ComponentSource's .NET beta component evaluation site, .NET beta components have accounted for an average of ten percent of all ComponentSource's corporate product evaluation downloads, it added.

"Interest in commercial 'off-the-shelf' Microsoft .NET components from companies evaluating the Microsoft .NET Platform has been high. From a component market perspective, the early excitement and momentum around Microsoft .NET is unprecedented -- exceeding the early COM market of the Nineties. Microsoft .NET offers a very mature platform for component-based development, which addresses common issues such as component integration and cross-language support. This is extremely attractive to our community of component authors and corporate developers," commented Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource.

"With the availability of .NET, the market for Microsoft technology-based components will change dramatically. For example, components whose functionality has historically been relegated to the client can now be leveraged as distributed server-side components. Additionally, similar rich user interface functionality can be provided to Web servers via ASP.NET Server Controls. As these types of .NET components -- along with Web services -- are adopted across organizations, there will be a shift from client to server which will be reflected in component supply."

A spokesperson for Microsoft Corp. commented: "ComponentSource offers great insight on the open market for reusable components and XML Web services. Their efforts in matching demand with supply have helped kick-start the new third-party market for reusable .NET components and XML Web services."

"Tried and tested expert-built 'off-the-shelf' components offer tremendous value to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET developers globally by reducing the amount of code they need to write from scratch and increasing their time to market," said Marie Huwe, general manager for the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft Corp.

ComponentSource, which claims a user base of over a half million developers, said software component authors supporting the new third-party market for Microsoft .NET list the following reasons for porting their expertise to that environment: new revenue opportunities; increased scalability; ease of component integration and customization to enable customers to inherit and extend third-party components as needed; Common Language Runtime -- no need to offer multiple-language versions and supporting documentation as they did for COM components; ability to expose components or Application Programming Interfaces as Web services through XML and SOAP.

"ASP.NET enables applications that would have been awkward or impossible in classic ASP," said Carl Messina, vice president of sales and marketing for SoftArtisans, of Brookline, Mass. "Our customers can now use visual server-based controls and components to build robust functionality much faster than ever before. Since ASP.NET is such a compelling improvement over classic ASP, we estimate that over the course of the year .NET will represent 20 to 35 percent of our business. Since starting with .NET two years ago, we've released two completely new .NET native server-side components with many more to come in 2002."

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